Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 4 (1900).djvu/530

496 breeding Peewits, and from which you may, at the end of the month, put up small flocks of wary Curlews. And on the banks of the more sluggish streams there are other lush green marshes, adorned with great clumps of yellow iris, crossed by ditches grown up with marsh-plants, and flecked here and there with cotton-grass, which tells of places which in a less dry season would be deep and boggy. At Abersoch there is a nice marsh, with a lot of reed-grown water, where Moor-hens chuckle, and the Wild Duck's subdued quack may be heard in the evening; Reed-Buntings chant, and Sedge-Warblers chatter, and Herons come down to feed. Snipe, too, may be flushed from thickets of fragrant bog-myrtle (Myrica gale), where the spongy turf is full of bog-loving plants, and in June was gay with spikes of deep purple Orchis incarnata, pink ''0. maculata, and pale, sweet Habenaria bifolia.'' Moor-hens are common in the district, and haunt quite small streams. Herons are often to be seen in the marshes and harbour, or flying over. Snipes breed in the marshes, and I flushed one from a meadow of good grass, and saw another "drumming" over the high moorland on Cilan headland. Peewits are quite common, having a sufficiency of semi-waste ground to breed on. On the moorland at Cilan a mobbing bird came within a yard of my head as I was innocently gathering and washing a rare bog plant. In some of the narrow green marshes along the coast Peewits are very abundant, and their cries become most wearisome in time. Some were already in flocks at the end of June. The Ringed Plover is found all along the pebbly and sandy parts of the coast, their soft clear "pe-ip" (syllables hardly divided) or "peep" being a constant accompaniment to a walk along the beach. When two birds run together (perhaps to congratulate one another on their young having escaped observation), a chorus of "tooley tooley tooley" breaks forth from them. Oystercatchers are to be found all round the coast, at the base of rocky cliffs, on outlying rocks, and on the islands. I saw some, too, in Pwllheli harbour, and on the sands. Considerable numbers frequent one long raised pebble beach, in two terraces, which merges on the landward side in short turf or sand-hills. From the way they mobbed me (flying round rather high up, with a painfully monotonous cry, and anon coming straight at me) they seemed to have young.